Christine Borgman is one of my scholarly heroines; when it comes to her fine nose for current developments in e-scholarship and digital information retrieval and her thorough and concise way of communicating (alas, she is a specialist in scholarly communication) these issues via monographs, articles and lectures, she definitely belongs to my scholarly all-star gallery. Her latest book Scholarship in the Digital Age, was an indispensable resource for me when writing my Master’s thesis on the Scholarly Communication System and Open Access.

So I was really glad I found this lecture (which I can’t embed, sorry) by Christine Borgman online, in which she discusses most of her main topics: cyberinfrastructure and e-science, Open Access, the data deluge, collaborations and intellectual property and the scholarly communication value chain. The lecture is entitled Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, and was delivered at Columbia University.

 I also found, via Open Access News, this podcast with Alma Swan, Key Perspectives main consultant on Open Access, Scholarly Communication and Academic Publishing. In this podcast, conducted by Sara Bartlett from Talis, she discusses amongst others the current state and difficulties concerning e-books or digital monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the main subject of my current research for the OAPEN project. I especially like the way she recommends in the end that we need to stop the ‘pillarization’ in the Open Access focus, as OA journals, OA books and OA data are mainly targeted as separate issues by separate initiatives, whilst they need to be combined to create a truly interconnected collaborative scholarship.

Alma Swan also maintains a weblog, Optimal Scholarship and has been interviewed before by Richard Poynder. You can find that interview here.